Liberty Island fixture faces competition

Concession for visitors to statue has been family business

NEW YORK — For many people, riding a boat out to the Statue of Liberty is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Bradford Hill does it five days a week.

Hill is not some freedom fanatic. He, like his father and his father's parents before him, is a fixture on Liberty Island, selling sandwiches, postcards and T-shirts. Each year, tourists buy more than 100,000 statuettes of all sizes from his family business.

During the past 75 years, three generations of Hills have turned a dockside table full of trinkets into a mini-monopoly that takes in more than $15 million a year, according to the National Park Service. They have been the only shopkeepers on the island since the park service took control of the statue in 1933.

But now Hill is bracing to fight off a storm of well-financed competitors for his stronghold in New York Harbor. For the first time in more than a decade, the park service, which strikes exclusive deals with concessionaires and keeps a share of their sales, is preparing to seek new bids to run the shops on Liberty Island.

Hill said he expected several much larger companies, such as the food-service giant Aramark, which runs the concessions on Ellis Island, to try to break his family's long tenure. But he hopes his insider's knowledge of the island and how park service officials think will give him an advantage.

"This is my family heritage," said Hill, sitting in a cluttered office that he said previously was a men's room about 100 yards from the base of the statue. "This is home."

Indeed, the Hills have been on the island since the 1920s. Hill's father was born in the family home, which stood practically next door to the statue before being torn down.

They have weathered wartimes, a two-year refurbishment in the mid-1980s and the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the statue was closed for three months. Since then, new security measures have reduced the flow of visitors, whose numbers are almost a third below their 2000 peak.

Still, their business -- Evelyn Hill Inc., named for Hill's grandmother -- on Liberty Island ranks among the 10 biggest commercial operations in the entire national park system, according to the park service. And neither Hill, 50, nor his father, Jim Hill, is ready to part with it.

The elder Hill, 80, spent the first eight years of his life on the 12.7-acre island. Back then, it was still known as Bedloe's Island and the statue shared the land with Fort Wood, a U.S. Army post for military police.

Some of the residents of the barracks on Bedloe's Island commuted across the harbor to work on Governors Island. If they needed medical care, they rode boats to Brooklyn, Jim Hill recalled in a recent interview near his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Since the early years of Jim Hill's life, when tourists wanted a snack or a memento of their visit, a member of his family has been there to satisfy the craving, starting with his father, Aaron.

Aaron Hill, who had been based on the island as a soldier, bought the snack stand from a military officer who had run it. That was in 1931, and it was merely a table with an umbrella set up on the pier where the ferry docked.

He later moved the snack counter indoors; a copy of a five-item menu from those days shows that customers could pay a nickel for coffee or a cigar and a dime for tomato juice, a hamburger or a "frank on a roll."

Aaron Hill and his family continued living on the island until the park service arrived in 1933 and started displacing the residents, Jim Hill said. The Hills moved to the Bronx; from there, Aaron Hill rode the subway to Lower Manhattan and a ferry to his shop. He died in 1943.